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One thing that’s been on my personal bucket list for a while is to make a flash dress up game. I’m not entirely sure of the reason. Maybe it’s because they are cute? Or I like customizing things? Regardless, I come across them a fair amount, and due to the sheer volume of them floating around online, I assumed they must be super quick and easy to make. WRONG.

The most time consuming part was making the actual artwork, which I had anticipated. I made the doll base and everything in the game in Adobe Illustrator. Having to save each object as an EPS, open it in Photoshop, save it as a PNG, them import it to Flash was downright obnoxious. I asked myself “Jeeze, someone should make like Photoshop actions for Windows 7 to do this crap for me. Hell I should do that. I would be rich.” Then I started mentally decorating my imaginary mansion…I digress.

I kept my game fairly simple: 3 different sets of ears, tails, faces, and outfit/accessory choices. I used Actionscript 2.0 (I tried 3.0, I promise, but I could not invest enough time to make it work). I made clothes/ears/tails drag-and-snap because I personally find trying to line things up by hand (or cursor?) to be a huge pain. Making them snap turned out to be much more simple than I expected.

For the actual process of building the game, I used a few different tutorials I found on DeviantArt. The first one I used was this one by KawaiiPandah, which provided a good basic overview, but has some holes in it (like providing code without too much description or explanation) if like me, you aren’t familiar with Adobe Flash. This tutorial by BonnieMcPop was much more clear, and probably the one I’d be most likely to recommend because it gives good explanations while being fairly concise. Lastly, I referenced Hapuriainen’s tutorial when I wanted a little more clarification. Hers is probably the most comprehensive, but was little bit of information overload for me.

So, by the time I was finished making all the objects, and coding them, I was just dead exhausted…hence the super plain background. To all the people who make super involved dress up games with elaborate backgrounds, music, tons of color choices, etc.: mad respect, bro.

You can play the dress up game here (where it’s the proper pretty size) or just get the file of the transmedia server here.